Increasing overseas traveling, booming Internet and electronic communication, and expanding global social ties are primary features of intensifying global connectivity and integration. Global Connectivity and Local Transformation conceptualizes global connectivity as a powerful but varied mechanism that links local people to the global society. Professor Jiaming Sun explores the massive global connectivity that has been woven in two decades in Shanghai. People with stronger and more extensive global connectivity with a net of other social economic characteristics make significant differences in terms of cultural adaptation in local society. By employing the empirical study method, this study features detailed quantitative analyses to measure global connectivity in an innovative and compelling way.
As new networks of railways, steamships, and telegraph communications brought distant places into unprecedented proximity, previously minor discrepancies in local time-telling became a global problem. Vanessa Ogle’s chronicle of the struggle to standardize clock times and calendars from 1870 to 1950 highlights the many hurdles that proponents of uniformity faced in establishing international standards. Time played a foundational role in nineteenth-century globalization. Growing interconnectedness prompted contemporaries to reflect on the annihilation of space and distance and to develop a global consciousness. Time—historical, evolutionary, religious, social, and legal—provided a basis for comparing the world’s nations and societies, and it established hierarchies that separated “advanced” from “backward” peoples in an age when such distinctions underwrote European imperialism. Debates and disagreements on the varieties of time drew in a wide array of observers: German government officials, British social reformers, colonial administrators, Indian nationalists, Arab reformers, Muslim scholars, and League of Nations bureaucrats. Such exchanges often heightened national and regional disparities. The standardization of clock times therefore remained incomplete as late as the 1940s, and the sought-after unification of calendars never came to pass. The Global Transformation of Time reveals how globalization was less a relentlessly homogenizing force than a slow and uneven process of adoption and adaptation that often accentuated national differences.
Multi-faced Social Transformations: Challenges and Studies brings together the proceedings of the 7th Slovenian Social Science Conference, “The Challenges of Social Transformations”, held in September 2014. It was organized by the School of Advanced Social Studies (SASS), the Slovenian National Committee of the Management of Social Transformations programme (MOST), and the Slovenian National Commission for UNESCO. The multidisciplinary contributions presented here analyse various aspects of the economic, social, and cultural transformations that accompany the contemporary globalized world. The book consists of four sections dealing with particular areas of transformations. These include a range of political, economic and cultural dimensions that are observed from the macro-level, in social systems and structural changes, to the micro-level, in aspects of individuals’ lives. The book will be of interest for academics in the field of social sciences, as well as for civil society activists and policy makers. The frames of the transformations are not limited to the European space, and provide a more global perspective.
Until around 1990, Shanghai was China's premier but sluggish industrial center. Now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the joint impact of global forces and state power has turned Shanghai into a dynamic megacity. This collection places the city's unprecedented rise in a rare comparative examination of U.S. cities, as well as with Asian megacities Singapore and Hong Kong, providing a nuanced account of how Shanghai's politics, economy, society, and space have been transformed by macro- and micro-level forces.
1. 1 Researching the global everyday of women activists 1. 1 Researching the global everyday of women activists: Experiencing and doing globalisation Going through the broad spectrum of globalisation research and literature, one might be astonished at how much it assumes the force of global change, and how little of this literature demonstrates this force in an empirically grounded way. This study, being based on six months of empirical research in Malaysia in 2004, sets out to counter this lack of thick description of globalisation processes. It takes up the challenge of researching the “global everyday” (Appadurai 2000, 18) of civil society actors in Malaysia and focuses on how social activists belonging to different branches of the women’s movement selectively app- priate, transform and even create global meanings and materialise them in local practices. The methodological endeavour of combining globalisation research and ethnography has been taken up by a diversity of authors. Burawoy and his research team have developed a complex methodological framework by focusing on the experiential dimensions of globalisation. They want to produce a “grounded globalisation” or “perspectives on globalisations from below” (Burawoy 2000b, 338, 341). This perspective is very fruitful, as the notion of experiencing globalisation as “forces, connections, and imaginations” (Burawoy et al. eds. 2000) relocates the global in the local and ties both together in mutual constitution.
ABSTRACT There are two major technological revolutions in the history of humanity that have been experienced chronologically and continue until today. These are the society 5.0 and industry 4.0 revolutions. The aim is to carry out professional and academic studies that will enable the invention of related technologies in order to increase the welfare level of humanity and reach the targeted level of welfare within the scope of technology and human values. Therefore, the future of societies will be designed with qualified human resources and innovation paradigm, which are two important factors that will enable humanity to be prosperous and sustainable societies. This study covers the transformation of individuals, societies, businesses and especially government authorities for the society 5.0 and industry 4.0 revolutions that will deeply affect all societies globally. It is explained how qualified human resources will change the future with the effect of new technologies and new jobs in the synthesis of technology and people. In addition, there are propositions about how it will affect the development of societies with science, technology, innovation and R&D studies for the intellectual accumulation of qualified people, and most importantly entrepreneurship ecosystem. There are studies on how societies develop the production economy with the innovation-development model, that classical societies are transformed into learning and rational societies, individuals' learning and development responsibilities change and expectations from them are at a higher level, especially technology and science take place in all areas of business and social life. It has been researched which new talents and skills people should have for new jobs within the scope of child and women entrepreneurs, digital natives, and the future of generation x and y. The innovation paradigm is at the heart of these ability and skill researches in the synthesis of technology and people. It has been determined how to use technology and science power for innovation, local and global effects of innovation, and which mission humanity should lead for the future. In addition, Research has been conducted on the most important agendas of today, including innovative development issues with digitalization and digital transformation technologies, transformation of societies, smart cities, digital countries, the future of societies, digital natives and world citizenship, Turkey's digital transformation roadmap proposition, industry 4.0 technology ecosystem and technology development zones in the digital age. Keywords: technology and human, innovation, digital transformation, industry 4.0, society 5.0, future jobs and technology
This book examines the explicit effects of global connectivity on local culture and society in post-reform mainland China. It focuses on individual level globalization in China and how global socialization impacts local residents’ behaviors, lifestyle, value orientation and the consequence of local transformation. Asking questions such as: What types of individual global connections have emerged and developed in China over the last three decades? What aspects of local transformations are influenced by such global connections? How does the impact of global connections vary across different aspects of local communities and institutions? Jiaming Sun uses an original micro-level relational approach to analyse how different types of individual global connections may make a difference and constitute certain outcomes of local transformation, the outcome being that global connections are capable of facilitating local transformation across different spatial, economic, and cultural settings.
This book provides an integrative Business Transformation Management Methodology, the BTM2, with an emphasis on the balance between the rational aspects of transformation and the often underestimated emotional readiness of employees to absorb and accept transformation initiatives. Comprising four phases - Envision, Engage, Transform, and Optimize - the methodology integrates expertise from areas such as strategy, risk, and project management. Covering the formal and informal structures and roles needed for a successful transformation, the authors cover a wide range of theory to help understand the phenomenon of transformation. A '360-degree' view on what business transformation means and how to manage it successfully, this handbook is suitable for business executives dealing with organizational change. A range of illustrative case studies ensure this is also a valuable resource for academics interested in change and transformation management.
This book offers new critical approaches for the study of adaptations, abridgments, translations, parodies, and mash-ups that occur internationally in contemporary children's culture. It follows recent shifts in adaptation studies that call for a move beyond fidelity criticism, a paradigm that measures the success of an adaptation by the level of fidelity to the "original" text, toward a methodology that considers the adaptation to be always already in conversation with the adapted text. This book visits children's literature and culture in order to consider the generic, pedagogical, and ideological underpinnings that drive both the process and the product. Focusing on novels as well as folktales, films, graphic novels, and anime, the authors consider the challenges inherent in transforming the work of authors such as William Shakespeare, Charles Perrault, L.M. Montgomery, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and A.A. Milne into new forms that are palatable for later audiences particularly when--for perceived ideological or political reasons--the textual transformation is not only unavoidable but entirely necessary. Contributors consider the challenges inherent in transforming stories and characters from one type of text to another, across genres, languages, and time, offering a range of new models that will inform future scholarship.
